Far-right political parties in Europe are stepping up their anti-Muslim rhetoric and forging
ties across borders, even going so far as to visit Israel to hail the Jewish state as a bulwark against militant Islam.

National Front leader Marine Le Pen has shocked the French political elite in recent days by comparing Muslims who pray outside crowded mosques — a common sight during the holy month of Ramadan — to the World War Two Nazi occupation.

Oskar Freysinger, a champion of the Swiss ban on minarets, warned a far-right meeting in Paris on Saturday against “the demographic, sociological and psychological Islamisation of Europe”. German and Belgian activists also addressed the crowd.

Earlier this month, Wilders visited Israel and backed its West Bank settlements, saying Palestinians there should move to Jordan. Like-minded German, Austrian, Belgian, Swedish and other far-rightists were on their own Israel tour at the same time.

“Our culture is based on Christianity, Judaism and humanism and (the Israelis) are fighting our fight,” Wilders told Reuters in Amsterdam last week. “If Jerusalem falls, Amsterdam and New York will be next.”

While he seeks anti-Muslim allies abroad, Wilders said some older far-right parties such as France’s National Front or the British National Party were “blunt racist parties I don’t care for” and he would avoid cooperating with them.

Campaigns aimed at Muslims have been gaining ground in Europe, most notably with the Swiss minaret ban last year and France’s law this year against full facial veils in public, which Wilders said the Netherlands should copy next year.

Support for these steps has spread beyond anti-immigrant parties and towards the political centre as globalisation and the ageing of Europe’s population fuel voters’ concerns about national sovereignty, according to a leading French analyst.

Political scientist Dominique Reynie said the financial crisis had prompted more voters to agree with the far right that their political elites were incompetent.

“Some people refuse what they see as a change in their cultural or religious surroundings,” he told the Paris daily Le Monde. “These are the problems posed by mosques, burqas and the provisions of halal food.”

Some on the far right see similar trends in the United States. Wilders attended a rally in New York on Sept. 11 to protest against a mosque planned near Ground Zero and the leader of the Austrian Freedom Party, Heinz Christian Strache, has said he wants to visit the United States to meet leaders of the Tea Party movement.

Marine Le Pen, who is preparing to succeed her father Jean-Marie as head of the National Front, had in recent years toed a more moderate line before her anti-Muslim comments. She notably refused to echo the anti-Semitic views expressed by her
father.

On Sunday, she insisted all public subsidies for building mosques must stop. Several politicians and Muslim leaders have said Muslims often pray in the street because they do not have enough space in mosques and urged that more be built.

The rightists’ Israel visits set what some analysts call the “new far right” apart from older extremists who were often anti-Semitic and backed Arab countries against the Jewish state.

Declaring support for Israel gives them an opportunity to oppose Muslim opinion in their home countries, since European Muslims are often pro-Palestinian, as well as celebrate the Jewish state as the front line against militant Islam.

“It is not Israel’s duty to provide a Palestinian state,” Wilders said in a speech in Tel Aviv. “There already is a Palestinian state and that state is Jordan.”

A so-called “Jerusalem Declaration” issued by four other European rightists during their Israel visit also staunchly defended the country’s existence and its right to defend itself
“against all aggression, especially Islamic terror.”

Heinz-Christian Strache from Austria, German Freedom Party head Rene Stadtkewitz, Sweden Democrat MP Kent Ekeroth and Filip Dewinter, head of Belgium’s Vlaams Belang party, denied they were stoking Islamophobia with their statement.

“The Arab-Israeli conflict illustrates the struggle between Western culture and radical Islam,” Dewinter said in Tel Aviv. Strache made a similar link to Europe, telling a conference in Ashkelon — a city that has been hit by rockets from the nearby Gaza Strip — that Israel faced “an Islamic terror threat that aims right for the heart of our society”.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz accused the rightists of “trading in their Jewish demon-enemy for the Muslim criminal-immigrant model” and visiting Israel only to get
“Jewish absolution that will bring them closer to political power”.

Birds of a feather flock together and in Robert Spencer’s case it seems that he has latched onto a fellow Catholic in Austria by the name of Ewald Stadler.

The only problem is that Stadler is a politician with the BZO, a group that he found along with Jorg Haider, a neo-fascist. Stadler has also made some controversial statements on Nazism.

Here is the video Spencer posted on his site and his comments, it has been reposted by the BNP since,

Austrian MP Ewald Stadler, addressing the Turkish ambassador to Austria, here dares to tell the truth about Islam in Turkey and in Europe. It’s breathtaking. Ewald Stadler surely deserves to be nominated for Anti-Dhimmi Internationale of 2010.

Ewald Stadler is an Austrian politician and was a member of the Austrian Freedom party until 2007. He was counted among the so-called “German National” wing of the FPÖ (Austrian Freedom Party/ freedom party Austria) but was also a proponent of the (previously less known) conservative catholic views in his party. Stadler constantly attracted attention with his controversial statements on the Nazi era. He asserted that the end of the National Socialist(nazi) command in Austria would not give any relief/liberation. In the European elections in Austria in 2009 he was the top candidate of the BZÖ .

Is it any surprise that Spencer is so awe struck by Stadler? A fascist whose party is classified as right-wing (right-populist), and who has made borderline Nazi favorable comments? In reality it once again peels away at the facade that Spencer has created as a defender of the West when in reality he is nothing more than an anti-Freedom fascist.

It also adds to the list of Fascists that Spencer has supported and spoken with:

A right-wing Austrian political party’s published a flash game in which the countryside is overrun with minarets and mosques and players must stop their construction. Because nationalism and xenophobia’s so much more fun when it’s in the German language!

Moschee Baba (“Bye-Bye Mosque”) is a minute-long, shooting-gallery type game in which a stop sign is clicked on a minaret, mosque, or muezzin (the guys who sound the morning calls to prayer). It’s a political ad for the Freedom Party in the Styrian province; regional elections are coming at the end of the month.

No one’s killed and nothing’s destroyed in the game, but its tone is pretty hateful and paranoid and it’s pissed off political opponents but good. Social Democrats, the Green Party and the Muslim community have demanded the game’s removal and an investigation for “incitement.”

The game is, of course, a gross caricature of the reality of the situation in Austria. Only four mosques with a visible minaret exist in the country. None are in Styria, whose population is 1.2 percent Muslim.

After the game ends, it serves players with a push poll, asking if there should be a ban on minaret construction, wearing of burqas, niqabs or other Islamic garments, and if Muslims should sign some oath accepting Austrian law’s primacy over the Koran. Fun stuff.

Two schoolgirls are to be expelled after setting a Muslim girl’s hijab headscarf on fire during a school trip.

The 15-year-old girls, from Graz, Austria, escaped race hate charges by claiming the attack was a prank and not related to the victim’s religion.

The Austria News website reports that this is one incident in a growing trend of attacks on Muslims and Muslim women in particular. In a somewhat sloppy translation from the German to English we read,

Austrias Broadcasting Corporation reports that girls and women with a religious preference to the Islam have massive problems in Austria. Few days ago a muslim schoolgirl was attacked by two schoolmates, which tried to set her on fire with a lighter.

Now Muslim associations in Austria claim that such kind of encroachments are no individual cases. Muslim women have to suffer sneer and discriminations day in, day out. Roswitha Al Hussein is the spokeswoman of the female Muslim club called “SOMM”. She said that the case of the Muslim schoolgirl in Styria is extraordinary savage, but also psychological violations, which Muslim women in Austria has to accept day by day, are also quite bad.

“Teachers think that such things are just a dalliance but it’s bullying”, said Mrs Al Hussein. The spokeswoman claims that there is not enough support for Muslim schoogirls from teachers. “Sometimes nasty boys pull on the headscarfs of the girls, and tell them that they should remove it”, said Al Hussein.

Especially in times of election campaigns the situation is becoming worser. People think that it’s socially acceptable to criticize Muslims in public, explains Roswitha Al Hussein. She hopes that there is more support for Muslims in the future.

The two girls who wanted to set their Muslim classmate on fire were sent off from school. They did not wanted to apologize for their offence.

Incidents such as these prove that the climate of Islamophobia and anti-Muslim sentiment is not abating, instead it verifies the findings of the Pew Global Studies Survey that Islamophobia is on the rise in Europe. A worrying trend given the recent successes of far right and fascist parties in different European nations. How long until we see discriminatory and anti-Democratic laws being passed in most of the European parliaments?

The reactions of the anti-Muslim blogosphere to a story such as this has been one of support and happiness, with the crazy wing-nut Shekyermami proclaiming it as an instance of “Hijab Resistance,” while the curiously named Infidels United blamed the victim for her plight saying it was a reaction to the “Muslim Invasion of Austria.”